Rensselaer Union, Volume 9, Number 24, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 1 March 1877 — Value of Constantinople to Bussia. [ARTICLE]

Value of Constantinople to Bussia.

A olawcr at the map will show the paramount importance to Russia of the acquisition of this territory. Comprising more than half of all Earopc, she is practically cut off from the navigable seas. She has, indeed, a long coast-line upon the Arctic Ocean, but she has there only the Inconsiderable port of Archangel, and this can be reached only by-rounaing the North Cape and sailing far within the Arctic Circle, while the port itself is blocked up by ice seven months of the year. She also borders for seven hundred miles upon the Baltic and tbe Gulf of Bothnia; but here, in the northwestern corner of her territory, she has only two tolerable ports, Cronstadt and Riga, and these are frozen up for nearly half the year; but from these ports is carried on tbree-fourths of her foreign commerce. She next touches salt water in the Black Bea, almost 1,500 miles from St. Petersburg, on the extreme south of her territory. This sea, half of whose shores belong to Russia, is 720 miles long and 880 miles wide at its broadest point, covering an area, including the connected Bea of Azof, of nearly 200,000 Snare miles—more than twice that of the great lakej of North America. Russia wishes to be a great maritime power. The Black Bea has good harbors and abundant facilities for building ships and exercising fleets. Into it fall all the great rivers of the southern half of Russia, except the Volga, whose mouth is in the Caspian; and the Volga may properly be considered a Black Sea river, for a railway or even a canal of a few leagues would connect it with the Don aad the other rivers of the Black Sea system. The Black Sea is emphatically a Russian sea; but Russia enjoys the valuable use of it only by the 'sufferance of whomsoever holds Constantinople. By the Treaty of Paris, concluded in 1856, after the reverses of the Crimean War, Russia agreed not to maintain a fleet there; and it was not till 1870 that, taking advantage of the critical position of the other Great Powers, she declared that this article of tbe treaty was abrogated. She has now a strong fleet of iron-clads and other steamers in the sea, but the actual strength of this fleet is unknown except to herself. It was certainly powerful three years ago, and is doubtless much more powerful now. A vessel and crew which has navigated the “ Bad Black Bea,” as the Turks call it, has nothing to fear from the broadest ocean. But this sea is liable at any moment to be a closed one to Russia. No Russian man-of-war has, we believe, ever sailed into or out of it; no merchantman can enter or leave it except by the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles, which are its gates, and of these gates Turkey holds the keys. The Black Bea is joined to the deep, narrow Bea of Marmora by the straits of the Bosphorus,twenty miles long and from three-quarters of a mile to two and a half miles wide. Just where the straits open out into the Bea of Marmora stands Constantinople, a spot marked out by nature as the one on the whole globe best fitted for the site of a great metropolis. At its western extremity the Sea of Marmora—about 100 miles long, with a maximum breadth of forty-three miles—contracts into the straits usually called the Dardanelles, which is propeny the name of four castles, which, two on each side, command the passage, here less than a mile wide. Both straits 3ould easily be so fortified as to be impassable by the combined navies of the world; and even now we suppose that only the best armored ironclads could safely undertake to force the passage, in or out of the Dardanelles. — Galaxy for March. -